Duck Confit with Crisp Beetroot Salad
The salad to go along side this is easy too and involves no more than whisking a dressing together and grating the beetroot on a mandolin.
Duck Confit with Crisp Beetroot
Salad
Brioche Pudding with Dried Figs
This was meant to just have cherries in it but I forgot to get them that day so I rummaged around the the cupboard and cheated a little with a packet of Whisk & Pin dried fruit compote that was mostly figs which I love so hey, figs it was! They worked really well if I do say so myself.
Brioche Pudding with Dried
Figs
The fish has volume, and vents?
Once I got home though, I couldn’t really be bothered doing anything except drink the champagne. Sunday night I still wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do with the snapper so I decided to tea smoke it and make a large single serve vol au vent. It was surprisingly easy and tasted pretty damn good. Much better than those vol au vents your mum used to make at dinner parties in the 80’s and early 90’s!
Smoked snapper vol au
vent
Smoked Snapper Vol Au Vents - Serves
2
1 whole fresh snapper
1 tablespoon of black peppercorns
1 tablespoon of cardamom pods (crushed)
1 fresh bay leaf
1 cup sugar
1 cup of salt
1 cup of white rice
1 cup of black tea
1 sheet of short crust pastry
1 cup of stock (I used rabbit, but vegetable, chicken or fish would
be ok)
1 tablespoon of corn flour
1 tablespoon of fresh cut parsley
Place the snapper, pepper, cardamom, bay leaf and half of the salt
and sugar in a plastic container and cover with water. Leave for
two hours (6 in the fridge). Take the fish out and let it air dry
for a while or pat it dry with some paper towel.
Line a roasting tin that you have a rack and a lid with foil. Mix
the rest of the salt and sugar with the rice and tea and pour
evenly into the foil. Place the tin over a low heat (preferably
with a simmer mat) and heat until it starts to smoke. Place the
fish on the rack, the rack on the rice and the lid on the tin (get
all that? Good). Leave for an hour and turn the heat off but do not
remove the lid.
Once the whole lot has cooled, take the lid off and start to flake
the flesh off the snapper trying to keep the bones out of the
mix.
Heat your oven to 180ºC and cut two circles out of the short crust
pastry and rings out of the puff pastry, the same diameter as the
short crust circles. Place the two pastry stacks on a baking tray
and bake for 20 minutes or until the pastry rings have risen.
Boil the stock and add the corn flour, whisking constantly until it
has thickened. Add the fish and re-heat gently so to not break the
fish up further. Stir through the parsley then taste for seasoning
and then spoon into the vol au vent cases.
Plum and Hazelnut Torte
Bowl of Angena Plums
Plum and Hazelnut Torte -
Serves 8 or more
700g of Plums, quartered and pitted
1 Cup of Sugar
¾ Cup of Hazelnuts
1¼ Cup of Flour
¼ teaspoon of Salt
1½ teaspoons of Baking Powder
½ teaspoon of Allspice
¾ Cups of Butter
3 large Eggs
1 teaspoon of vanilla
Preheat your oven to 175°C. Butter and flour a 9" spring form cake
tin.
Quarter and pit plums.
Coarsely chop half of plums and in a bowl toss with 2 tablespoons
sugar. In another bowl combine remaining plums with 2 tablespoons
sugar. The chopped plums will go into the batter, and the quartered
plums will decorate the top. On a baking sheet in middle of oven
lightly toast hazelnuts until fragrant and insides are golden, 10
to 15 minutes. Put all of the nuts into a clean tea-towel and rub
them together to remove the burnt loose papery skins and when cool,
grind them in a food processor until fine.
In a bowl whisk together
hazelnuts, flour, baking powder, salt, and allspice. In a bowl with
an electric mixer beat butter and remaining ¾ cup sugar until light
and fluffy, the colour will change to a very pale yellow. Add eggs,
1 at a time, beating after each addition, and beat in vanilla and
flour mixture until batter is just combined. Note, add the flour to
the batter, and not the other way around.
Drain chopped plums in a
sieve, pressing on fruit, and pat dry with paper towels. Stir plums
into batter and spread evenly in pan.
Drain quartered plums in
sieve, pressing on fruit, and arrange, skin sides up, over batter.
Bake torte in middle of oven 1 hour and 20 minutes, or until golden
brown and a tester comes out clean. Cool torte in pan on a rack 30
minutes. Remove side of pan and cool completely.
Pork Sausages with Roased Tomatoes, Capsicum and Fennel with Cannellini Beans
The quality of supermarket sausages is generally pretty poor so I try not to buy them unless I have no choice. Who want’s a monochrome pink paste that’s supposed to be pork? I try and get to the David Jones food hall for they’re excellent selection of high quality classics to more unusual blends. The Duck Pear and Cognac is a favourite. Last night however, I had to get what I could form the supermarket and ended up with what were labelled as “Pepperberry and Garlic” and assuming pork.
What a surprise. No pink monochrome paste and a good blend of herbs. These were really quite nice sausages. The idea was to make pork sausages with tomato sauce and cannellini beans, but given what I originally suspected were going to be bland sausages I picked up a fennel bulb and a red capsicum (bell pepper) and roasted them all for an hour with olive oil, salt pepper and rosemary before I diced and mushed them together to go with the beans and sausages. It turned out to be an excellent combination, although it could have used a bit of a chilli kick.
Duck Confit Salad with Walnuts, Pear and Gorgonzola
I’ve since made a few duck dishes at home, including a pepper crusted duck breast with a fresh blueberry sauce with kipfler potatoes wich was wonderful, however the last attempt was duck confit. I’d never had it before, let alone made it. Wow. Sure it takes two days from start to finish but the results are amazing. Besides, it’s only an hour of actual work.
The walnut, pear and Gorgonzola salad I made with the confit was even better, possibly even a contender for the best duck dish in Sydney, if I do say so myself.